How Netflix scaled its API

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When you think of scale, you usually think of adding more servers. But at Netflix, a “cloud-native” company fully hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), you won’t find a huge datacenter in the background. That’s nothing to sneeze at when you consider that the video streaming provider accounts for 33 percent of all Internet traffic in North America during peak hours.

Having a robust API program was paramount to Netflix’s ascension. With requests coming in from thousands of supported devices in more than 40 countries, Netflix streams content to 36 million subscribers.

Daniel Jacobsen, Director of Engineering, kicked off the Atlassian Dev Den Tech Talks in San Francisco with a deep dive into how Netflix autoscaled its API to mitigate outages and overcome the growing pains of explosive growth. As both a content platform and provider, Netflix’s API lies at the heart of its ability to stay buoyant. Daniel talked about how Netflix uses a few open-source tools, such as Asgard, to build and deploy services to the cloud.

Missed his talk? Just check out photos, video, and slides below:

Video:

Slides:

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